Getting Settled In...

This last week has been exhausting, but still great! Highlights:

-On Tuesday afternoon, I met up with a Tibetan guy from couchsurfing, who took me to the Wild Goose Pagoda, a landmark in Xi'an, and dinner. It was nice to get to practice my chinese with him, although kinda hard because his first language is Tibetan, not Chinese, so his Chinese was actually not very good. He doesn't really use tones, for example. Also I think he thought it was a date because he called me today just "to chat". Yikes, haha. He said there are lots of cool Tibetan cultural events that he's going to this spring so I think that will be interesting. Most of the time we were together, he talked about his home town in Qinghai (a really poor province on the Tibetan Plateau mostly inhabited by Tibetans and other minorities) and Tibetan Culture, and how the Chinese government/Chinese people "other" him and his people. VERY interesting...

-Had the extremely unpleasant experience of having my bank card number stolen somehow so I had to deal with that and cancel my card. SO annoying when you live in CHINA! And my Gmail got hacked and a bunch of my messages got deleted, but fortunately Google retrieved them. All my labels are gone though so my years of organization are gone! :(

-I got my official residence permit! yay! So now I have my passport back, and am free to travel to Beijing next weekend, and then on to the USA for 2 weeks!! :)

-On Thursday night, I went out with my professor, her husband, and her grad students. It was a very casual dinner, which was nice and delicious. Normally at these kinds of dinners, I can't understand what people are saying because they're talking so fast and I can't jump into the conversation because it takes me like 2 minutes to formulate a sentence in my head first and then it's too late, haha. But at this dinner, they all made an effort to speak a bit slower for me and not use really big words. Plus they actually just wanted to get to know me more so the whole night they were asking me questions and talking with me. It was great, but also really exhausting because Chinese is taxing on the brain. Also somehow got into a discussion about whether democracy is good for China/is it going to happen w/ my professor's husband who works for the government. That was awesome. Overall they're so nice and friendly and really want to help me with my research so I'm really excited about that! :)

-Saturday I moved into my apt! I spent the first few hours cleaning and throwing out stuff from the last tenant (a fellow Fulbrighter from last year!). Then today I went furniture shopping, and ended up getting a shoe rack, a coat rack, a closet, AND a mattress for less than 1000rmb (about 150USD)!!! China is so cheap!!! I got all the stuff on this street with a bunch of hole-in-the-wall cheap furniture stores. They assembled everything and delivered via a guy with a bike who tied my stuff to the back, very funny. Now I'm almost totally set up! :) I'll do a special post on my apt once I do all the final touches. But so far I love it! They're so much organization space too, which obviously I LOVE. And today I received my 4 GIANT bags that I had left with Wayne in Beijing, and it only cost 430rmb (about 70USD)!!!! AMAZING! I highly recommend sf express to anyone out there who needs to ship domestically in China. They were super fast too- only 3 days from Beijing to Xi'an!

Oh, and I know you're all dying to write me letters and send me packages full of delicious America-ness so here's my new address:

西安市新城区民乐园万达广场（解放路110号）二号公寓9单元504室


Also discovered a great new IKEA-like store that has awesome organizational things AND there's one in Xi'an! It's called MUJI- organization freaks, feast your eyes on this website.

That's it! Have a good week everyone!